Mark Thissen

The mismatch between local voting and the local economic consequences of Brexit

ABSTRACT The mismatch between local voting and the local economic consequences of Brexit. Regional Studies. This paper reveals that in the 2016 UK referendum regarding whether to remain in or leave the European Union, the regions that voted strongly for leave tended also to be those same regions with greatest levels of dependency on European Union markets for their local economic development. This observation flies in the face of pro-leave narratives that posited that the major beneficiaries of European Union membership were the ‘metropolitan elites’ of London. Economic geography dominated the observed voting patterns, and geography will also certainly dominate the post-Brexit economic impacts, but not necessarily in a way that voters anticipated or wished for.

Regional Competitiveness and Smart Specialization in Europe

Regions economically differ from each other – they compete in different products and geographical spaces, exhibit different strengths and weaknesses, and provide different possibilities for growth and development. What fosters growth in one region may hamper it in another. This highly original book presents an accessible methodology for identifying competitors and their particular circumstances in Europe, discusses regional competitiveness from a conceptual perspective and explores both past and future regional development policies in Europe.

A Multiregional Impact Assessment Model for disaster analysis

ABSTRACT This paper presents a recursive dynamic multiregional supply-use model, combining linear programming and input–output (I–O) modeling to assess the economy-wide consequences of a natural disaster on a pan-European scale. It is a supply-use model which considers production technologies and allows for supply side constraints. The model has been illustrated for three floods in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Results show that most of the neighboring regions gain from the flood due to increased demand for reconstruction and production capacity constraints in the affected region. Regions located further away or neighboring regions without a direct export link to the affected region mostly suffered small losses. These losses are due to the costs of increased inefficiencies in the production process that have to be paid for by all (indirectly) consuming regions. In the end, the floods cause regionally differentiated welfare effects.

Smart specialisation in the tangled web of European inter-regional trade

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a new methodology to assess the outward connectivity among regional economies in the European Union (EU) and derives policy lessons for the design of regional innovation and competitiveness-enhancing strategic frameworks, with particular reference to research and innovation strategies for smart specialisation (RIS3). Design/methodology/approach – The authors study the network of inter-regional trade flows in the EU25 in the year 2007. Trade data are taken from the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency database and mapped onto weighted directed networks in which the nodes represent regions and the links are flows of goods. The authors measure several structural characteristics of the networks, both global properties and centrality indicators describing the position of individual regions within the system. Findings – European regions appear to be mostly integrated in the European single market. Strengths and weaknesses of individual regions are dis...

The Magnitude and Distance Decay of Trade in Goods and Services: New Evidence for European Countries

Abstract Using a newly assembled, consistent and disaggregated dataset (12 goods and 7 services) on internal and bilateral trade for 25 European countries, we analyse the difference between trade in goods and services. The measurement of both trade in goods and trade in services is improved over earlier research, allowing us to compare trade in goods and services in a coherent and systematic way. First, our dataset is made consistent with the domestic demand and production and the total exports and imports at the sector and product levels. Second, we explicitly control for re-exports. We find that, although goods are more often bilaterally traded than services, the volume of bilateral trade in services does not attenuate less with distance than the volume of bilateral trade in goods.

Economic development, place-based development strategies and the conceptualization of proximity in European urban regions

The notion of proximity is increasing in popularity in economic and geographic literature, and is now commonly used by scholars in regional science and spatial economics. Few academic works, however, have explored the link between regional development and proximity relations. This comprehensive book redresses the balance with its assessment of the role of, and obstacles caused by, proximity relations in regional development processes.

Analysing the Competitive Advantage of Cities in the Dutch Randstad by Urban Market Overlap

In the modern economy, cities are assumed to be in fierce competition. In contrast with this, regional and national Dutch policymakers advocate the Randstad region as a single urban region in which economic complementarities are supposed to be numerous. Using insights from urban systems theory and urban ecology, we introduce an indicator to estimate the degree of revealed competition between cities based on patterns of inter-firm relations between these cities. Results indicate that urban competition is more the rule than the much-anticipated urban complementarities, as urban functional influences of the Randstad cities spatially overlap.

Regional economic competition and place- based policies: Contemporary Theories and Perspectives on Economic Development

textabstractAnalysing regional competitiveness by benchmarking regions on various indicators is a common practice. However, such rankings of regions are not based on actual competition; instead, they compare a set of regions on various indicators. This chapter benchmarks regions using a measure for revealed competition based on product-specific spatial market overlap on firms’ export markets, on knowledge cooperation among scientists, and on the attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI). This analysis shows that this revealed competition is not only spatially different for these three types of competition, but that it is also region- and market-specific. This confronts policymakers with complicated place-based decisions concerning investments aimed at enhancing a region’s competitive position in Europe, which is far more complicated than suggested by existing benchmarking exercises. The chapter illustrates this with the example of the city of Utrecht, which is currently the most competitive region according to the European Regional Competitiveness Index.